Strauss-Kahn admits to 'moral failings'

Posted: Monday, September 19, 2011

By Associated Press

PARIS -- Dominique Strauss-Kahn broke his silence four months after a New York hotel maid accused him of sexual assault, calling his encounter with the woman a "moral failing" he deeply regrets, but insisting in an interview on French television Sunday that no violence was involved.

Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund and a one-time top presidential contender in his native France, also denied using violence against a French writer who claims he tried to rape her in a separate 2003 incident.

Throughout what appeared to be a heavily scripted 20-minute-long interview with French broadcaster TF1, Strauss-Kahn managed to come off as contrite even as the Socialist politician insisted he hadn't forced himself on either of the women.

He said his May 14 sexual encounter with Nafissatou Diallo, an African immigrant who claimed that he attacked her when she entered his room in Manhattan's Sofitel hotel to clean it, "did not involve violence, constraint or aggression."

Still, he acknowledged, it "was a moral failing and I am not proud of it. I regret it infinitely. I have regretted it everyday for the past four months and I think I'm not done regretting it."